ON A WINTER DAY forty years ago, I remember standing in a country village far from Moscow looking for a church — as was my wont. I approached a bent, much bundled, aged woman. I asked her if there was a church close by and, if so, where I might go to find it. Her eyes were the pale, watery blue sometimes characteristic of the old. A deeply melancholy expression came over her face, and she answered: "It's a long, long walk to church."

In point of fact, for the quarter century between Khrushchev's campaign against religion and Gorbachev's revision of policy in 1988, one could travel east from Chita for 1,000 kilometers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad without passing a single church. One could also travel 600 kilometers west from there without passing a church. Sakha-Yakutia, with an area more than the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, has had only one church from the time of the Khrushchev drive until 1993. Most of the million Russians living east of the Urals and north of the sixty-second parallel have had to travel almost 2,000 kilometers to reach the nearest functioning church. Truly, it has been a long walk to church.

This study is a secular examination of the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in recent times. It is difficult to be objective about religion. I am reminded of a cartoon published long ago of a matron in a bookshop asking for "an impartial history of the [U.S.] Civil War, written from the Southern point of view." For those who might be curious, I am a member of the United Church of Christ.

For those unfamiliar with Orthodox ecclesiastical usage, a monastic priest takes a saint's name when he becomes a monk and drops his surname. Sometimes, in written works, the surname is added in parentheses after the saint's name in order to avoid confusion. For example, one might write "Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev)." The metropolitan's name as a boy was Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev.

I am indebted to Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, to the late Philip E. Mosely, and to the late Frank Nowak, who reviewed early work that ultimately led to this manuscript. Haym Jaffe of Drexel University assisted me in statistical projections. William C. Fletcher of the University of Kansas read this manuscript and prepared a perceptive, enlightening, and immensely helpful commentary on the book and all its parts. Donald W. Treadgold of the University of Washington encouraged me to go to Westview Press and introduced me to senior editor Peter W. Kracht, who has proved extremely helpful and unfailingly supportive of my efforts — as has his associate, Mick Gusinde-Duffy. The project editor, Mary Jo Lawrence, and the copy editor, Ida May B. Norton, have been extremely helpful and untiring in their care, patience, and support. I am also indebted to my wife, Elizabeth, my son, Thomas Rohde Davis, and my daughter, Margaret Davis Mainardi, for criticism, editing, and work on the draft. The manuscript was typed by my son, and some early materials were typed by my daughter. James F. Winstead of Harvey Mudd College prepared the graphs in the volume.

Research for this study was supported in part by a grant from the International Research and Exchange Board (IREX), with funds provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the United States Information Agency. Research was also supported by a fellowship from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation. None of these organizations is responsible for the views expressed.

N. D.

WHEN THE COMMUNISTS took control in Russia, they were determined to subdue all opposition forces, including the Russian Orthodox Church. More fundamentally, as Marxists, they wanted to build a society without God, and the church blocked the way. Not only in the lands that became the Soviet Union but in every country where the communists seized power after World War II, a struggle between the state and the churches ensued.

Twice in the history of communist rule in the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks and the Soviet state drove the church to the threshold of institutional death, or at least to its antechamber. The first time was at the end of the 1930s, when Stalin's men had wiped out virtually all of the resources of the church. The second time, although less dramatic, was in Brezhnev's "period of stagnation." Following Khrushchev's headlong assault in the early 1960s, the subsequent slow erosion of Orthodox institutional strength exposed the possibility of the church's ultimate extinction.

Both times, fortuitous events saved the institutional body of the church. In 1939, the turnaround followed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Soviet annexations, Hitler's invasion of the USSR, German permissiveness toward Orthodox Church renewal in the occupied zones, and Stalin's later policies toward liberated areas. In the late 1980s, the millennium of the baptism of Rus in 988 (the Millennium), glasnost and democratization, Gorbachev's felt need for new sources of support, his desire for international acceptance, and his pragmatism led to a new Soviet religious policy. Now, after the collapse of the communist institution, aggressive Marxist ideological materialism in Russia is a whispered memory. For a second time the church is rising like a phoenix from the ashes of misfortune.

Why has the church twice been renewed in vigor and strength? Was it luck, which could change? Was it something intrinsic in the natural order that prevents the triumph of antireligion? Was it the constancy of God, which ultimately rules human history, politics, and society? ¹ There are at least two problems in any attempt to answer these questions. First one must consider whether the things observed in the external realm of life — church buildings, priests, church attendance, and other religious activities — truly reflect the inner reality. Second, one must consider whether the world's historical and social experience makes it possible to say that the communists, in trying to build an atheist society, assumed an inherently impossible task.

Religion has been defined as "the outward act or form by which men indicate their recognition of the existence of a god. . . the outer form and embodiment [of] the inner spirit." ² Outward manifestations are all that can really be examined, as a secular analysis of the inner spirit is uncongenial to the instincts of social scientists and historians. It was also beyond the communists' natural reach.

Nevertheless, churches are earthly institutions, rooted in the terrain of observable reality. They are not made of disembodied ectoplasm, conjured up out of nothingness. In June 1991, Patriarch Aleksi II (Ridiger) responded to those who claimed that the head of the Russian Orthodox Church in the late 1920S, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski), could have defied the communists and refused to make a declaration of loyalty to a godless state: Metropolitan Sergi wanted to save the Church. I know that many people, hearing these words, protest that it is Christ who saves the Church and not people. This is true. But it is also true that, without human efforts, God's help does not save. The Ecumenical Church is indestructible. But where is the celebrated Church of Carthage? Are there Orthodox believers today in Kaledoniya, in Asia Minor, where Gregory the Illuminator and Basil the Great earned their renown? Before our eyes the Church in Albania was destroyed. . . . And in Russia there were powers wishing to do the same thing. ³

Think of a "City of God" in the Soviet Union, which the communists assaulted in their days of militant atheism. The city's "temples" might represent the various religious bodies, each one rooted in the earth, where the city could be attacked and where its dimensions on the ground could be measured. Each of the temples also had — and has — a vertical dimension in the realm of the spirit, and no one who stood on the earth could clearly see to the tops of the columns, domes, and towers, as they were shrouded in mist. That is the realm of philosophers and theologians, who are not earthbound. This study will describe the situation on the ground; it is at this level that the communists made their assault, because they too were earthbound. ⁴

When they were young and filled with optimism and arrogance, the communists honestly believed that they could destroy the temples by knocking out the bottoms of the columns and by blocking all efforts to shore them up. Faith might have died within a generation or two in a nation where no house of worship stood, where no priest celebrated the liturgy, where no one taught a child about God, and where an empty silence of the spirit ruled the land. Even a catacomb church was within reach of the communists' bulldozers. Dedicated Christians worshiping secretly in the deep forest might have been hard to find and apprehend, but their activity was still of flesh and blood and not beyond the grasp of state authority if the believers were pursued with sufficient means and determination.

The image of an earthbound "temple" is intended only to distinguish the inquiries of the historian and the philosopher, not to describe the churches as inert or the historian's task as a simple measurement of dimensions and unchanging forms. At its heart a church consists of people; it might better be described as "an army on the march." ⁵ Moreover, religious institutions do not always grow or shrink incrementally, which would enable the scholar to count churches, priests, and other resources and project trends in some linear fashion. Hegel wrote that "history is in fact a spiral process; great creative periods are followed by periods of reaction in which the spirit, apparently dying, is restoring itself to emerge in new creativity at a higher level." ⁶ The Chinese philosopher Lin Yutang said much the same thing: "Thoughts and ideas are somewhat like seeds. They have a way of lying dormant underground until a more favorable climate brings them again to life." ⁷

The appearance on the world stage of great individuals also results in imponderables and discontinuities. Perhaps this is the curse of historians, particularly those who write their histories too soon. Augustus, who left a memoir of the most notable events of his reign, made no mention of the birth of Christ. The year before the Millennium of the baptism of Rus, 1987, may have been like 1533 — the year before Luther completed his translation of the Bible, Calvin began to write the Institutes, and the Society of Jesus was conceived. By the time 1991 had drawn to a close, the collapse of communist government and of the USSR had provided a discontinuity no less portentous than the events that followed the year 1533. History's great periods of tumult are inherently uncontrollable, unpredictable, ruled by personality and chance, and also by those furious, primordial forces that characterize social revolutions in every epoch. Some anthropologists and historians have argued that the communists' objective of eradicating religious practice was intrinsically unattainable. They point out that secular power has never succeeded in eradicating religious practice in any society and that this suggests some fundamental human need to worship. Were the communists necessarily doomed to failure?

As a step toward providing the answer, we may all agree that secular political power has been able to change religious patterns, even if not to eliminate them. In 1555 the Treaty of Augsburg, between the Catholics and Protestants in Germany, decreed that the religion of a territory would be determined by its prince. With few exceptions, it was. Similarly, in Kievan Rus, Prince Vladimir accepted Orthodox Christianity in 988, thereby determining the prevailing religion in his land. It is also clear from history that redirecting religious allegiances has always been a bloody and a difficult business. A realistic communist would have concluded that the destruction of a competing religion required a great and sustained effort. Nevertheless, religions — indigestible though they may be — have been devoured by the adherents of other faiths.

Religions can undeniably be changed, but can religion be destroyed? To prove that communist power could not have eradicated religion, one must show both that (1) religion is an intrinsic and universal social need, and (2) communism is not a substitute faith.

The renowned anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote in the 1930s that religious phenomena are universal, and her findings are still accepted by her colleagues:

A note of caution must be added here. Although it is broadly true that religion can be found in every society, not all individuals feel the need to worship. Therefore, it would seem that religion is not essential in individual terms, even though it appears to be so in social and societal terms.

Alternatively, an inquiry into past realities might indicate whether religion is an intrinsic social need. A record of constancy in the intensity of religious observance throughout history — regardless of state policy or other secular influences — would strengthen the argument that religion is an elemental force that cannot be suppressed. There have been vast changes over time, however, in the level of apparent religious loyalty. In the history of the West, the age that followed Christ's life and teaching has been characterized as intensely religious, as has the thirteenth century — the age of the cathedral builders. For an age of reduced religious intensity in Western civilization, one might choose Greece at the time of Alexander's conquests, when even the mystery religions appeared to have become stagnant. Before Mohammed, the religious ideas of the pagan Arabs were said to have been vague and scanty. Then came the Prophet, followed by the triumphant march of Islam.

If we think of the religious impulse as something that can be stimulated, we must also concede that it can be reduced or can atrophy. In fact, some historical support might be found for the communists' contention that social progress brings secularization.

As a matter of historical record, atheism has seldom been espoused, and the lack of historical adherence to atheism means that there are few examples from which to argue that the communists' atheistic experiment had to fail. The precedent that most readily comes to mind is the campaign against religion during the French Revolution, but this attack was not sufficiently coherent or prolonged to demonstrate the intrinsic strengths or weaknesses of a godless social order. The very fact that the communists' road has been so nearly unexplored makes it difficult to assert with confidence that natural forces would block it.

Moreover, totalitarianism is a modern concept, and communism probably went further than its competitors in imposing control over people's lives and minds. The communists developed techniques of mass psychological manipulation that might have enabled them to accomplish more ambitious social mutations than authoritarian states had been able to achieve previously.

For a communist theoretician, the universality of religion did not present a serious problem — religion was consistently regarded by the Marxists as a symptom of exploitation, suffering, fear, and ignorance. Exploitation was considered universal prior to the establishment of socialism in Russia; thus it was not surprising that religion was also universal. Because the world the communists sought to create was avowedly unique, a society without religion likewise would have been unique. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the apparent universality of religious observance remains an arresting historical and social fact.

Was communism a substitute faith? If it was, one can make the argument that religion is a universal societal phenomenon by pointing out that the communists were simply trying to replace the traditional religions in the Soviet Union with their own creed. Here we must not confuse Christianity and the other highly developed doctrines with religious manifestations that appear to be universal. According to Ruth Benedict, religion is not the "pursuit of ideal ends" or "the desire to live more virtuously and to interpret the transitory in terms of the eternal." She explained that primitive cosmologies are often elaborated in direct contradiction of the theme of good and evil and observed that "religion is not historically a citizenship in an ideal world, but had to do with success in this world." ⁹

Communism actually had most of these elements, including the "pursuit of ideal ends," citizenship in an ideal world, and success in this one. One of the most important attributes scholars ascribe to the world religions is an integrated belief system that gives meaning and regularity to the human experience and unites doctrine with action. In the glory days of the Bolshevik movement, the communists' godless creed accomplished this. Reinhold Niebuhr argued that the real faith of modern society is faith in history, which has the promise and meaning of existence and takes the place of God. In this sense, Marx founded a "historical" religion.

Paul Tillich observed that both Old Testament prophetic revelation and Marxism "regard the fight between good and evil forces as the main content of history." ¹⁰ John C. Bennett commented: If religion is defined as man's relationship to whatever he regards as ultimate or to whatever he trusts most for deliverance from the evils and hazards of life, then Communism is undoubtedly religious. . . . Communism occupies the place in life for the convinced Communist that religions occupy in the lives of their adherents. Communism offers a goal for life. It offers a faith in redemption from all recognized evils. ¹¹

Communism shared with many religions and several secular callings the physical accompaniments of worship, including ceremonies, shrines, and rites. Lenin's mausoleum and the Red Square parades, complete with icons of Lenin and other communist saints, were examples. It takes an act of faith to be an atheist for the same reasons it takes an act of faith to be a believer.

Of course, there are some characteristics associated with religion that communism never shared. One of these is the immortality of the soul, which some — but not all — religions espouse. Communism's denial of the afterlife may not have been troublesome to a young person building Soviet socialism in the mid-1920S. However, in times of war, bereavement, or approaching death, the individual who was otherwise satisfied with communism might have been inclined to seek the comfort of religion. The communists acknowledged that this was the case during World War II. They explained such backsliding by saying that insufficient time had elapsed after the 1917 revolution to erase the earlier religious culture.

Perhaps the key element in religion that communism lacked is the recognition of the supernatural. Ruth Benedict defined the supernatural in primitive religions as a "wonderful power," or a "voltage, with which the universe is said to be charged." ¹² In other religions it is God. This assertion of the supernatural is universal in religion and constitutes for many scholars its definitive quality. In actuality, however, the emphasis on the supernatural has varied widely from one religion to another. Moreover, if the only element lacking in communism that can be surely identified in all the world's religions is supernaturalism, this would mean that the essential difference between communism and religious faith is an element shared by religion, magic and superstition. This was the view of the communists, who asserted that tribal peoples feared the natural forces that destroyed crops or threatened the community's welfare. Failing to understand these natural forces, tribal peoples made gods of them. The cure was knowledge.

Albert Boiter commented: Others see Soviet communism as a new religion in everything but name, lacking only belief in a transcendental being. But even this void is seen by some as being filled by the deification of science and progress. Franz Cardinal Koenig (1975) of Vienna has accused the Soviet government of maintaining a confessional state of the traditional type, with the state acting as protector of one established faith. ¹³

Although it is true that the supernatural element in primitive religion is not exalting, each society lives according to its own sophistication of thought and complexity of experience. Both the primitive and the advanced society, each in its own terms, may find some fulfillment in acknowledging a higher or different power beyond human grasp or understanding. The communists, who believe there is no heaven, saw no need to build toward it in the vertical dimension of the spirit. To those who believe that altars should point toward the sky, the communists appear to have constructed their temples by marbling over the barren ground, which stretches out in one vast, glittering, empty temple floor. Earlier in this discussion I argued that secular influences have a genuine impact on a church's inner condition or, to phrase it another way, that a church's foundations are embedded in the real world. I also asked whether the communists tried to create a religious void or merely to clear a place for their own faith. Even if one could find a religious essence in terms which disqualify the communist "creed," this would still leave a number of alternative possibilities. I posed several of them thirty-five years ago when I was completing a dissertation on the church under communism. I suggested that the pressure of natural forces to fill the religious vacuum in the communists' realm might have crumpled the materialists' social order; alternatively, it might have pushed the communists back from any effort to destroy the churches. For their part, the churches conceivably might have been pushed into the narrow corner of human experience occupied by superstition and magic. Another possibility was that the sharpness of the communists' determination to annihilate religion might have dulled and that fraternization and compromise might have grown from a tactic to a condition. ¹⁴

What is interesting today is how close to having been answered and resolved these questions and alternatives seem to be. Fraternization and compromise did grow from a tactic to a condition in the Soviet Union, but the onrush of events did not stop there. The communist faith disintegrated. Totalitarian communist power, after a spasm in August 1991, crumbled. The communist motherland fragmented. Relatively few people, at least in the developed "first world," still think of communism as a compelling substitute faith. Arthur Koestler was correct when he called communism "the God that failed." Corruption, careerism, and cronyism in Brezhnev's "era of stagnation" washed away the materialists' commitment. Successor governments in the former Soviet Union abandoned the effort to destroy the churches. Most of them are, almost poignantly, now seeking the support of Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, and other religious communities. The dogmatists of atheism are stumbling in the wilderness.

Whether the present situation will be permanent is another question. Not much in the former Soviet Union today can be regarded as stable, lasting, or reliable. An attempt to resolve this question here, however, would be to jump to the end of this story, and we are just beginning. This introduction should not end without a glimpse of the passion, beauty, and faith that characterize the Russian Orthodox Church world. Anyone who has been present during Orthodox services over the years has a head filled with pictures. They are of bundled old women in scarves and felt boots creaking to their knees and bowing down over the cold stones of the sanctuary floor. They are of the deeply lined countenances of aged priests, a distant light shining from tired eyes. They are of the faces of the women carrying collection plates through crowds of worshipers, cheeks illuminated by sturdy candles planted among the ruble notes. They are of the exhilaration, crush, and, yes, odor of immense crowds as midnight turns to Easter morn. They are of the catch in one's breath when the news is passed that Christ is risen. They are of the woman behind the candle counter who presses a single egg painted blood red into one's hand at Eastertime. ¹⁵

The pictures are of alert, intelligent young men and women presenting themselves for baptism, diffidently, uncomfortably, but resolutely. They are of the dark shadows of faithful, ancient nuns. They are of thousands of flickering candles, white beards, glittering miters, and golden robes and of the resonance of choral singing by unaccompanied voices. They are of the eyes of Jesus and the Mother of God looking out from icons into one's own eyes, no matter where one stands. They are of the smell of incense. They are of little, wooden country churches with shingled onion domes approached by walking across wet fields. They are of a dark-suited, bearded man walking down a street, looking to neither the right nor the left, who turns into a churchyard and unlocks the door of an empty church before scheduled services.

The pictures are of the robust woman in the bell tower of the St. Florus nunnery in Kiev pulling on dozens of big and little ropes in an almost frenzied but joyous dance as her bells peal out to the world in a triumphal cacophony. They are of the priest in the village of Ib telling U.S. visitors matter-of-factly that there were 120 priests in Komi until the late 1930s when 100 of them were taken to the airport and were shot dead as "enemies of the people." They are of the old widower made bishop of Brest in 1990, shown with his arms around a sturdy peasant who has knelt and buried his head in the folds of the bishop's cassock. They are of the round old woman in the Kharkov cathedral, just before services, telling a U.S. student to take his hands out of his pockets and stand erect, after her rotund form had perfectly imitated his long and languid slouch. They are of the old mother in the Kiev railroad station in Moscow blessing her grown and visibly embarrassed son before he takes his train. They are of the published snapshot of another old bishop and a young priest taken from across a meadow as they sit on a bench near a church, two distant black figures, talking of eternal things. ¹⁶

The pictures reflect the affirmation of Orthodox writers that the church is a living body where today's believers are surrounded by all the saints who have ever lived. As one Russian Orthodox priest put it, "Today living saints walk the face of the earth in Russia."

The year 1939 was the worst in history for the Russian Orthodox Church. Never before had the institutional and human situation of the church been quite so desperate. Never again, after the Soviet territorial acquisitions of 1939-1940 brought new priests, bishops, and resources to the church, would it become quite so bad.

In 1939 the acting head of the church, Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski), lived in Moscow, virtually cut off from the few score churches still functioning in the vast Soviet land. According to a well-informed observer, Wassilij Alexeev, "Sergi awaited arrest each minute. . . . His attendant went away during the night, fearing that he would be arrested with the Metropolitan [if he stayed]. . . . The aging hierarch remained completely alone . . . and if something like a heart attack had occurred, he would have died without aid of any kind." ¹

All the monasteries, nunneries, and seminaries were closed. Dioceses did not exist as administrative units. A few of the separated churches sent irregular letters to the metropolitan, but even this meager correspondence consisted mostly of greetings. ² The Russian Orthodox Church was in agony.

How did the church reach this pass? Although this book focuses on post-World War II events and more particularly on the contemporary situation, a brief review of the church-state struggle between 1917 and 1939 may be in order.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the Russian Orthodox Church was electing its first patriarch since the time of Peter the Great (1682-1725). After the fall of the czar, even the modernists in the church had become convinced that a strong, unifying leader was needed, and the provisional government had given permission for a church council with the authority to act. Eleven days after the storming of the Winter Palace, Metropolitan Tikhon (Belavin) of Moscow was chosen by lot from among three elected candidates. ³

The new Soviet government already had nationalized all church lands, and it would soon decree the separation of church and state, cancel the church's status as a juridical entity, ban state subsidies to clergy and religious bodies, seize church bank accounts, deny legal standing to church marriages, divorces, and baptisms, and ban organized religious education of the young.

Still, most of the church leaders believed that the communist government was an affliction that would pass. After electing Patriarch Tikhon, the council affirmed that the Russian Orthodox Church was the national church of Russia, that the state needed church approval to legislate on matters relating to the church, that blasphemy should remain illegal, that church schools should be recognized, and that the head of the Russian state and the top appointees in education and religious affairs should be Orthodox. ⁴

In January of 1918, the patriarch excommunicated the faith's "open and secret enemies." ⁵ Other pronouncements from the patriarch and the church council followed, excommunicating priests or laymen who connived against duly appointed ecclesiastics, facilitated antichurch legislation, laid hands on Orthodox churchmen, or committed acts against the church. ⁶ The stage was set for confrontation, and it came, despite the patriarch's refusal to support the Bolsheviks' enemies in the civil war that soon engulfed the nation. In fact, the church-state struggle was but a part of the cataclysm through which Russia was passing. All of society had been riven asunder, and the misfortunes of the church seemed to be, in a sense, by-products of revolution and chaos.

On the all-European scene, Russia was losing World War I, having suffered over 9 million casualties — more than any other belligerent. Appalling conditions had characterized the situation at the front. Sometimes Russian soldiers had been obliged to wait in backup trenches, lacking even rifles, until the deaths of comrades allowed them to scavenge arms. As the British military attaché described it, the soldiers had been "churned into gruel" by German artillery. ⁷ In the peace treaty with Germany signed in March 1918, the Soviet Union lost a third of its population and a third of its arable lands.

The defeat abroad hardly matched the upheavals at home. Soldiers streamed home to their villages to grab pieces of land. Russia's erstwhile allies invaded Britain and the United States in the far north, Britain and France in the south, and Japan and the United States in the far east. Anti-Bolshevik forces advanced toward Petrograd and Moscow from the north, south, east, and west. In the meantime, former Czech and Slovak prisoners of war seized the Trans-Siberian Railroad. Cruelty, brutality, and torture were appalling. Just as the anti-Bolsheviks faltered and the Western powers began losing stomach for their interventions, the Poles attacked. Kiev changed hands seventeen times between 1918 and 1921 before a peace favorable to Poland was signed in Riga.

In the countryside, the Bolsheviks organized Committees of the Village Poor and sent out workers and soldiers from the cities to seize grain. Peasant revolts swept the countryside, and the civil war became a peasant war. Industrial output plummeted to one-seventh of its prewar level. Citizens fled Moscow and Petrograd seeking food and safety in the countryside; more than half the people in those cities abandoned them. The ruble stood at one two-hundred-thousandth of its prewar value.

Over 7 million people died from hunger and epidemics; cannibalism spread. The editor of Pomoshch [Relief], the organ of the All-Russia Famine Relief Committee described it: "People mainly ate members of their own families as they died, feeding on the older children, but not sparing newborn infants either . . . despite the fact that there wasn't much to them." ⁸

In this context of desperation, the Bolshevik regime demanded the church's valuables for famine relief. On February 19, 1922, the patriarch duly asked parishes to surrender all precious articles except those used in sacraments and worship. A few days later the government launched a propaganda campaign against a "heartless" church and ordered virtually every treasure confiscated, including consecrated vessels. ⁹ Loyal Orthodox believers rallied to defend their sacramental treasures, and the Russian press reported some 1,400 bloody fights as priests and parishioners tried to guard their churches. ¹⁰ The bloodiest incidents occurred in Shuya, east of Moscow, where church supporters and Bolsheviks battled for days. Throughout the country churches were closed by force, and priests and hierarchs were arrested. Although there had been bloody incidents before, this was the first great crisis in the church-state struggle. ¹¹

Almost a half century later it was revealed that Lenin had sent a secret memorandum to his Politburo colleagues on March 19, 1922, in which he wrote with brutal candor that the campaign to seize church treasures was intended to break the power of the clergy, not simply to obtain resources with which to buy food. Lenin called the opportunity "exceptionally beneficial," the only moment "when we are given ninety-nine out of 100 chances to gain a full and crushing victory" over the clerical enemy and assure ourselves the necessary positions for decades ahead. It is precisely now and only now, when there is cannibalism . . . and corpses are lying along the roads that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of valuables with fanatical and merciless energy. . . . No other opportunity but the current terrible famine will give us a mood of the wide masses such as would provide us with their sympathies or at least neutrality. . . . Now our victory over the reactionary clergy is guaranteed. . . . The trial of the Shuya rioters for resisting aid to the hungry [should] be conducted in as short a time as possible, concluding in the maximum possible number of executions. . . . If possible, similar executions should be carried out in Moscow and other spiritual centers of the country. ¹²

The fight over church treasures had ongoing consequences. On May 6, 1922,

Patriarch Tikhon was placed under house arrest — accused of resisting the confiscations. Leaders of reformist and leftist currents that had developed within the church, particularly after the 1905 Edict of Toleration, took advantage of Tikhon's confinement to seize control of the patriarchal chancery and church administration. ¹³ Calling themselves Renovationists, these clerics had coalesced into three factions. The largest of them, the Living Church, was led by Archpriest Vladimir Krasnitski, a radical-rightist cleric before World War I, who emerged as a leader of the married priests who wanted to change the Orthodox rule that permitted only monastic clergy to aspire to episcopal office. The second Renovationist grouping was led by Father Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedenski, a charismatic preacher who was alleged to be a libertine and police collaborator. Clerics in Vvedenski's Union of Communities of Ancient Apostolic Churches also wanted to open the door to married priests becoming bishops. The smallest but most respected grouping was led by Bishop, then Metropolitan, Antonin (Granovski), an opponent of autocracy even in the prerevolutionary time. The Renovationists had Bolshevik support, clearly motivated by the authorities' desire to split and thereby rule the church. The government turned over the majority of the functioning Orthodox churches in the country to the collaborating Renovationists. ¹⁴

For moral, traditional, and political reasons, most of the Orthodox laity disdained the Renovationists. The church schism was a blow to the institutional integrity of the patriarchal church, however, and it influenced Tikhon in his decision to "confess" anti-Soviet acts, renounce them, and declare that he was "no longer an enemy of the Soviet Government." The authorities freed him on June 26, 1923, and he was able to reassert his authority and turn the tide against the Renovationists. ¹⁵

By late 1924 the Renovationists had lost their control over a third to a half of the churches the authorities had given them. In the meantime, Lenin had died and Stalin was slowly consolidating his power. The New Economic Policy was bringing economic recovery and a modicum of normality. During this time, the strength of the patriarchal church grew. ¹⁶

On April 7, 1925, Patriarch Tikhon died, and his death plunged the church into a rolling crisis of leadership. By 1927, ten out of eleven prelates successively named to act as head of the church were in prison or exile, and most of the bishops were in similar straits. ¹⁷ The man who emerged as acting head of the church was Metropolitan Sergi (Stragorodski) of Nizhni-Novgorod. Arrested more than once, Sergi was released from prison in March of 1927 and issued a loyalty declaration to the Soviet government on July 24 of that year. Its key passage, which outraged many Orthodox in the Soviet Union and in the Russian emigration, recognized "the Soviet Union as our civil motherland, whose [the motherland's] joys and successes are our joys and successes, and whose misfortunes are our misfortunes." ¹⁸

Under the leadership of Metropolitan Antoni (Khrapovitski), formerly of Kiev, émigré Russian churchmen had met in the Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci in 1921 and established the Karlovci Synod, which ultimately became the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad. Promonarchist and prointerventionist resolutions of the synod had complicated Tikhon's position at the time of the first great antichurch campaign in 1922. Although Sergi did not collaborate with the Karlovcians, he had confidential correspondence with them, and the synod published a letter from Sergi in 1926 that the Bolsheviks used as a pretext for Sergi's arrest. After Sergi's loyalty declaration of 1927, the Karlovcians fiercely opposed Sergi and his perceived capitulation and came to regard the underground True Orthodox Church and True Orthodox Christians as the legitimate voices of Orthodoxy in the USSR. Metropolitan Iosif (Petrovykh), Metropolitan Agafangel (Preobrazhenski), Metropolitan Kirill (Smirnov), Bishop Aleksi (Bui), and the majority of the bishops imprisoned in the camps on the Solovetski Islands distanced themselves from Sergi and his loyalty declaration, although not all of them repudiated his authority. ¹⁹

The quieter times of the New Economic Policy were shattered by the forced industrialization and collectivization drives that started in 1928. At the end of 1929 and at the beginning of 1930, as had been the case in 1921 and 1922, troops and party workers fanned out into the countryside, this time to force the peasants to join collective farms. Peasant resistance produced violence once again, and farmers slaughtered their livestock and ate or destroyed stores of food and seed. Hunger returned. Although Stalin temporarily reined in the collectivization drive in March of 1930, pressures on the peasants soon resumed and a man-made famine spread. It reached appalling proportions in Ukraine and the northern Caucasus in 1932. At least 5 million people died from hunger and attendant diseases. A Soviet demographer noted a population loss of 7.5 million. In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev described how trains pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death; railroad workers had picked them up all along the route from Poltava. The rivers of the northern Caucasus carried thousands of bodies to the sea. ²⁰

As in the famine of 1922, the church was among the victims. Farmers posted guards and defended their churches and priests with scythes and pitchforks, but many priests and peasants were swept away in the general violence. The campaign changed the face of the countryside, which has been dotted ever since with the shells of churches serving as granaries, overcrowded dwellings, storehouses, and workshops, their rusting and disintegrating cupolas standing hollow against the sky. In 1932 city churches also became targets, and the 1929-1933 period became the second great wave of church closings. ²¹

In a dissertation completed some years ago, I made an effort to analyze the communist authorities' strategies and the churches' counterstrategies in their struggle in both the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe. ²² I shall not repeat the argument here. It was notable, however, that the evolution of communist strategy in the USSR came rather close to repeating itself in the "people's democracies" of Eastern Europe three decades after the battles between the Bolsheviks and Russian Orthodox believers. In both areas there was an initial political struggle characterized by violence, arrests, and church closings. The pattern continued with communist efforts to divide the various religious communities and split the ranks of clerical adversaries — the Orthodox in Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia; the Roman Catholics in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Croatia; and the Lutherans in East Germany. Church leaders in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were subsequently forced to make declarations of political submission, with varying degrees of exception in Poland, East Germany, and one or two other places.

Both in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, the frontal assault on religious communities receded over time and became a long process of attrition. This was partly because in most cases church leaders ceased to rally political opposition to communist rule and also because the costs to the communist authorities in foreign policy, internal popular discontent, and ideological embarrassment outweighed any need to liquidate the "religious problem" through precipitate means. The ideological embarrassment was related to the fact that Marx and Engels had taught that religion was a symptom of oppression, an "opium" to dull the workers' outrage and convert their revolutionary zeal into passivity, manifested in the dream of happiness in the next world rather than in this one. Theoretically, religion should have withered away naturally in a socialist society where the workers ruled.

The communists were always ready to take active measures to "help nature along," and the religious arena was no exception. As a practical matter, the Soviet authorities developed three long-range strategies designed to sap the church's vitality: interrupt the church's cycle of regeneration, confine the church to rites performed in church sanctuaries out of sight, and indoctrinate the people in atheism.

The church, like all human institutions, must renew itself with each new generation. The communists believed that the interruption of this process would ultimately eradicate religious practice and belief. One might use the analogy of a disease that the authorities wished to wipe out. This is not the way the communists expressed themselves, and they never did develop a wholly satisfactory rationale for the persistence of religion in socialist society. ²³ The analogy of disease, however, may clarify what the communist authorities were trying to accomplish. Take a disease-producing organism that passes through various environments and stages in its life cycle. If one can interrupt its regeneration at any point, the malady can be overcome. ²⁴ For example, one can spray ponds with oil to kill the larvae of malaria-carrying mosquitoes rather than attempt to catch the insects on the fly.

The communist authorities tried to interrupt the cycle of religious regeneration in analogous ways. In a series of laws and decrees issued between 1918 and 1924, they forbade the organized teaching of religion to persons under the age of eighteen. ²⁵ Let the old — or even the adults in society — go to church until they die, the communists reasoned, but save tomorrow's generation from reactionary belief. The early Soviet experiments in collective institutional child-raising — away from parental and grandparental influence — were part of this effort. The communists closed all the Orthodox seminaries and theological academies. ²⁶ Let the priests grow older, they reasoned, until they die off without replacement. The publication of new copies of scripture and liturgical books was terminated in the late 1920S, with the result that the books and scriptures of every confession were ultimately reduced to "a few old, worn, torn relics." ²⁷ Church-run shops making new liturgical garments, vessels, and other supplies were closed, and the communists waited hopefully for celebrants' robes to become threadbare tatters.

A church building does not quickly wear out, but the population moves, and a ban on new church construction could be the equivalent of closing churches. The Soviets took pride in the fact that the great industrial city of Magnitogorsk was built from the ground up in the 1930s without a single church. Demographic change worked against the church. Urbanization negatively affected Orthodox practice, as workers migrated from the traditional Orthodox culture of the Soviet countryside to the "godless" cities. No less a figure than Metropolitan Kirill (Gundyaev) of Smolensk acknowledged this problem in 1988. ²⁸ If they could immobilize the churches, the communists believed, society might grow away from religion.

This poses the question of theological growth — a difficult subject. The Russian Orthodox Church asserts the immutability of doctrine, expressed in the duty of the church to preserve the faith. The Orthodox do, however, recognize the need to reinterpret church teaching for a new generation. Some even understand faith as an ever-expanding concept, like the expanding universe created around us. Nevertheless, when beleaguered, churches tend to defend themselves by resisting experimentation. The time when a rampart is being stormed is not the time for reckless innovation. It might be, however, that the short-term value of resisting debilitating change will exact a long-term price in terms of arrested development. For these reasons, the communists may have preferred an immobile church. Emelyan Yaroslavski, the founder of the League of the Militant Godless, asserted that a reformed, modernized religion might become more dangerous than the old one. Soviet officials were wary of religion "in new, refined forms." ²⁹

The Marxists' second long-term strategy was to limit the churches to the performance of the rites within the walls of the sanctuary. Again, one might use the analogy of disease. The human body may combat an invading parasite or microbe by enclosing it in a cyst, thus isolating it and protecting the surrounding organism. Encased in this shell, the parasite may live for years, or die, or become calcified, while the body continues to live. ³⁰ In a certain sense the communists tried to do the same thing, confining religion behind the doors of the churches and isolating church life from society at large.

In 1924 the communists proscribed religious assemblies and processions. ³¹ This action affected some of the oldest and most treasured practices of the church. For example, there is an ancient tradition of going to the rivers on Epiphany to bless the waters. On this solemn occasion the faithful would build great ice crosses and tables on the frozen surface of the river, after which the bishop might cast a decorated cross into the hole in the ice, and intrepid youths would plunge into the frigid currents and rescue the cross as an act of piety and fortitude.

On April 8, 1929, the authorities decreed the dissolution of lay organizations and banned church-run charitable activities, including relief of the needy. The authorities closed Orthodox medical institutions, orphanages, and homes for the mentally ill, disabled, and the old. ³² In particular, Article 17 of the decree outlawed the use of church premises for activities beyond worship, thereby prohibiting libraries, organized religious education, prayer meetings for women and young people, religious study groups, and even sewing circles. The same decree mandated that clergy do their work only on the premises of the church society employing them, meaning that it was unlawful for a priest to serve two parishes or to celebrate the sacraments in nonchurch institutions (except to aid the sick or dying). It reaffirmed that churches lacked juridical rights. Central church organs were forbidden to establish bank accounts for the deposit of free-will offerings. The decree was largely a codification of earlier dispositions, and the rigor of its enforcement varied with the times, but it stood on the books for sixty years, consistently inhibiting church activities. ³³

Priests and other religious persons were prohibited from wearing their habits in public places, a measure that removed a visual reminder of the church. ³⁴ In 1932 priests were forbidden to live in the cities. ³⁵ In 1929 a scrap metal drive for industry resulted in the communists' seizing most church bells, thereby silencing them. The remaining bells were stilled by decree. ³⁶ The atheists used these tactics to remove the sight and sound of religion from the streets of cities and the byways of the countryside. These measures were also designed to foster a perception of the church as a place where rituals were mechanically performed, and nothing more.

The abolition of religious holidays in 1923 and the institution of Sunday morning "voluntary" secular activities, such as work brigades and sporting events, were part of an effort to separate religion from the world of daily life. In 1929 the government introduced a rotating six-day workweek. This work schedule gave the people Sunday off only once in every six weeks. The new workweek fostered the isolation of the religious communities, which were depicted as consisting mostly of pensioners and the incapacitated. Orthodox priests adjusted their service times, but the impact was real — and resented. ³⁷

A third long-range strategy to weaken religion was the communists' propaganda for atheism. Beyond the secularization of schools and the prohibition of organized religious education of the young, the government amended the Russian constitution in 1929 to outlaw proselytizing. The constitution of 1918 had given both atheists and believers the right to propagate their beliefs, but the 1929 amendment gave the right of propaganda to the atheists and allowed the believers only the opportunity to profess their beliefs and engage in worship. The 1936 Stalin constitution gave them only the right to worship. ³⁸

In the early years the thrust of atheist propaganda tended to be crude and political, although early Marxist leaders such as Anatoli Lunacharski and Lenin himself were intellectually impressive men. Lunacharski and other antireligious leaders were not afraid to engage clerics in open debate in those optimistic, uninhibited, and experimental days of the communist movement. Nevertheless, militant godless propagandists were more often blunt and coarse. In their enthusiasm, Bolshevik governmental leaders ordered the opening of reliquaries on March 1, 1919, and in August of 1920 ordered "the complete liquidation of the cult of corpses and mummies" by transferring these relics to state museums. The atheists tried to expose the "incorruptible" remains of saints as mere rotting bones and wax figures. In one museum showcase they exhibited the relic of a saint side by side with a mummified rat. ³⁹

In the early 1920s the communists tried to prove that the Russian Orthodox Church was the instrument of a corrupt, reactionary, and treacherous clergy. They accused priests and bishops of usury, black marketeering, and seditious collaboration with the anti-Bolshevik White Guards in the civil war. On a personal level, priests were depicted as licentious, sadistic, and depraved. A few clerics truly were immoral, of course, but not many raped small girls or sodomized altar boys as the propaganda would have had one believe. ⁴⁰

By the mid-1920s the propaganda began to change. With Tikhon's "confession" and Sergi's declaration of loyalty in 1927, the church's open defiance of communist power essentially came to an end. For their part, communist leaders began to discourage mocking parades and carnivals as counterproductive. Competition between priest-blessed and scientifically seeded grain plots became more characteristic of the atheists' efforts than actions to force open reliquaries. After complaints in the antireligious press that the believers made the unbelievers look foolish in debates, open confrontations of this kind mostly ceased. ⁴¹

The wave of violence in 1929 and 1930 and the famine that ensued produced a reversion. The League of the Militant Godless pushed its membership up to 5.5 million by 1932. The league's magazine, Bezbozhnik [The Godless], was supplemented by an array of atheist publications, traveling cinemas, antireligious "universities," godless shock brigades, godless collective farms, and proliferating antireligious museums. Mocking plays, songs, and carnivals reappeared. ⁴² The school curriculum, which had previously been essentially secular, became sharply antireligious. ⁴³

As the 1930s progressed, godless propaganda evolved into the form it retained until the late 1980s. Public attention was directed to the medical hazards said to be caused by religious practice, including the spreading of disease through drinking from a common spoon and cup in communion and by kissing icons. ⁴⁴ For example, in 1972 a U.S. apologist for the official Soviet position described the scene at the Trinity-Sergius monastery in Zagorsk as follows: "With a rag the priest periodically wipes the spittle from the pure silver coffin [of St. Sergius] . . . as pilgrims, mostly older women and mothers with their children, continue passionately to kiss the coffin." ⁴⁵ The Soviet press recounted stories of babies dying of pneumonia after baptism by immersion. ⁴⁶

Even so, there was a trend away from ridiculing believers. Some observers believe that the avoidance of provocative, flamboyant, antireligious acts caused the ideological campaign to sink into gray formlessness. The antireligious museums came to emit a distinct air of boredom. ⁴⁷ Despite its dissemination of at least 100 million copies of antireligious literature, the League of the Militant Godless lost almost two-thirds of its membership between 1932 and 1938. ⁴⁸

The third great wave of church closings began in 1936 at the time of the great purges. The official crackdown was given additional impetus by the discovery, jolting to atheist leaders and propagandists, that religious belief was not dying away as Marxist doctrine predicted that it must. The 1937 census had a question on religion, and the results, which were leaked to informed circles and the West, showed that over half the people in the country — two-thirds of the population in the villages and a third of the urban population — still considered themselves believers. Stalin had decreed in 1932 that the church was to be eradicated in five years, which would have been in 1937, and yet the census had revealed a "deplorable" persistence of belief. The authorities' reaction was to intensify repression. ⁴⁹

The archives of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs provide fragmentary data on the rising numbers of church closings in 1937 and 1938, then a slackening of the intensity of the antireligious drive between 1939 and 1941. ⁵⁰ William Fletcher also noted that the 1937-1938 attack became a bit more relaxed after 1938, at least with respect to underground religious activity. ⁵¹ One must add, however, that the easing in the number of church closings after 1938 may simply have reflected the fact that there were so few churches left to close.

Like the earlier two waves of church closings, the 1936-1938 campaign was very much a part of the general upheaval in society, which had ripped away all veneer of normalcy and restraint. The terror, the executions, and the growth of the labor camps in Siberia and in European Russia (i.e., Russia west of the Urals) were felt by everyone.

It may be remembered that on December 1, 1934, a shot in the back had killed the Leningrad Communist Party chief, Sergei M. Kirov. The circumstances of the murder lent credence to the probability that it was Stalin himself who had inspired the deed. Nevertheless, while "investigating" the crime, Stalin had the secret police interrogate and torture an ever-widening circle of people. Of the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party elected at the 1934 congress, more than two-thirds had perished by 1938. In the great purge trials, the towering figures of Lenin's time were forced to confess treasonous crimes, and most were executed. The commander in chief of the army, every officer who commanded a military district or an army corps, almost every division commander, and close to half of the 75,000 Red Army officers were arrested or shot. An estimated 19 million Soviet citizens died in the terror. The police (NKVD) became the largest employer in the USSR, responsible for a sixth of all new construction in the country. ⁵²

An understanding of the suffering inflicted on the whole citizenry of the USSR truly does help make clear what the Russian Orthodox Church was also going through and why there were no longer mighty armies of peasants able to hold off the militant godless as they tried to close the churches. And close the churches they did — and arrest the priests and incarcerate the bishops and exile the believers to the GULAG Archipelago. By the late 1930s, 80,000 Orthodox clerics, monks, and nuns reportedly had lost their lives at the hands of the Bolsheviks. This figure represents about half the total number of clerics, monks, and nuns serving before the 1917 revolution. ⁵³

In the late 1930s, there were only four active bishops in the USSR. ⁵⁴ In addition to Metropolitan Sergi, the church's acting head, there were Metropolitan Aleksi (Simanski) of Leningrad, his suffragan, Nikolai (Yarushevich), and Metropolitan Sergi (Voskresenski). Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov, the Orthodox dissident writer, described Aleksi's and Nikolai's situation: Aleksi's suffragan, Bishop Nikolai of Peterhof (the future Metropolitan), used to keep by him at home a small bag with two changes of clothes, two sheets and a towel — in case he was arrested. I think Metropolitan Aleksi also had a similar bag at home. Every two or three months brought some kind of unpleasant surprise — the arrest of a group of priests. By 1937 there were only fifteen of them left in the whole of the Leningrad region, whereas in 1930 they had numbered more than a thousand. In the spring of 1937 the metropolitan was turned out of his rooms . . . and found shelter for himself in the bell tower of the Prince Vladimir Cathedral in the cramped and gloomy accommodation formerly occupied by the caretakers. Metropolitan Aleksi took church services along with Archdeacon Verzilin, the only deacon left in Leningrad. After Verzilin's death in 1938 he celebrated without a deacon. . . . I remember once, as I was walking along Nevsky Prospect . . . I noticed the metropolitan clad in civilian garb. A threadbare light-weight overcoat, galoshes, an ordinary grey cap — all this, in conjunction with his aristocratic face and subtle elegance of gesture, gave him the appearance of a bankrupt landlord. As I passed I made him a deep bow and the metropolitan acknowledged it with a slight nod. He was very resigned. ⁵⁵

The church was perilously close to demise, given the canonical need for an unbroken apostolic succession — bishops were essential for the continuation of both a line of hierarchs and of priests. The police might have carried off the remaining openly functioning bishops in a single night. Why did Stalin not order the police to do so? Probably he had some concern for the likely international reaction and some desire to maintain the facade of freedom of worship, as declared in the "Stalin constitution" of 1936. In any case, those four bishops were spared.

What about church premises? There were about 50,000 churches before the Bolshevik revolution — or close to 80,000 functioning church establishments if one counted chapels, convent churches, institutional prayer houses, and so on. ⁵⁶ According to journalist Walter Kolarz, "By July 1937 not a single church remained open in Byelorussia." ⁵⁷ Yuri Degtyarev, an authoritative spokesman of the Soviet government and Communist Party, wrote that there were no open churches at all in more than a third of the seventy-odd regions (oblasts) of the Russian Federated Republic; in another third, each region had no more than five churches. ⁵⁸ Six regions in Ukraine had no open churches at all, and three regions had only one church each. ⁵⁹ In 1939 those nine regions constituted most of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A well-known specialist on Ukrainian churches, Bohdan R. Bociurkiw, confirmed Degtyarev's range of numbers; he reported fewer than a dozen Orthodox parishes intact in the whole of Ukraine before World War II. ⁶⁰ In the great Ukrainian diocese of Kiev, which had more than 1,600 churches before the 1917 revolution, the occupying Germans found two churches that had been functioning under the Soviets, one at the edge of the city of Kiev and one in the countryside. ⁶¹ One church was said to be open in the Ukrainian diocese of Zhitomir. ⁶² The Germans found one church in the city of Odessa, where there had once been forty-eight churches. ⁶³

Nikita Struve, another expert on Russian Orthodox religion, described the situation in the diocese of Rostov-on-Don, just east of Ukraine: Its archbishop, Seraphim (Silichev), had been exiled to the far north in 1930, where he soon died. Shortly afterwards, his Vicar, Mgr. Nicholas Ammasisky, was sent to the steppes of Astrakhan to graze a flock of sheep. In 1938 he was again arrested and this time shot, but miraculously recovered from his wounds. Meanwhile, the authorities continued to close the churches. In Rostov itself, even the former Cathedral of St. Nicholas was transformed into a zoo; the new Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky was razed to the ground; the huge Church of All Saints turned into a workshop, and the Greek Church became an antireligious museum. . . . Throughout the whole province, one single church, served by a very old priest, was still functioning in a village close to Taganrog. ⁶⁴

In the northern territories near Leningrad, an Orthodox mission team from Latvia followed the advancing Germans in 1941 and found only two functioning churches in that immense and populous territory. ⁶⁵

In the whole of the Soviet Union in 1939, there were only 200-300 open churches. ⁶⁶ This figure has been compiled from reports of no churches open in Byelorussia (Kolarz) and "less than a dozen" in Ukraine (Bociurkiw). There were fifteen to twenty churches in the city of Moscow, five in Leningrad, and a few more in the hinterlands of the two capitals, for a total of 150-200 in the Russian republic (Degtyarev's figures). ⁶⁷ There were, in addition, a few Russian Orthodox churches in Central Asia and in the Caucasus. This adds up to 200-300 churches nationwide.

The situation of the priests was little better. The Germans found three active priests in the two functioning churches in the diocese of Kiev (compared to 1,435 priests before the revolution). ⁶⁸ In the Ukrainian city of Kamenets-Podolski, the advancing Germans found one aged priest holding services, and the mission team from Latvia found two priests "reduced to complete impoverishment" in the area south of Leningrad. ⁶⁹

To complete this description of the church's travail, I recount the story of Metropolitan Sergi's removal from Moscow after the German invasion in 1941. As Hitler's armies approached, Stalin decided to evacuate most of the leaders of the religious communities, no doubt fearing that they might defect, or that the Germans could turn the Soviet churchmen to their own political purposes if they were captured. In fact, the decision to evacuate these men rather than kill them may have been sheer luck, as the Soviets in retreat had frequently executed people in such circumstances. Reportedly Sergi drew up a will on October 12, two days before he was sent east from Moscow. ⁷⁰

On October 14 the authorities rounded up Metropolitan Sergi and the other leaders of religious communities and — as A. Krasnov of the Renovationist church described it — crowded them all into a railroad carriage. There were Renovationist church hierarchs with some family members, a bearded old gentleman with one eye who was the Old Believer archbishop of Moscow and All Russia, some modestly dressed leaders of the Baptist community, and then "into the compartment came a medium-tall, old man with a broad, thick, grey beard, gold pince-nez, and a facial tic. He was dressed in a cassock and wore a monastic skullcap." It was Sergi, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, seen off by Nikolai and accompanied by Archpriest N. F. Kolchitski. ⁷¹

About 600 kilometers east of Moscow, during a trip that had already lasted days, Sergi became quite sick. As Wassilij Alexeev described it, Sergi developed a fever of 104° and drifted in and out of delirium. According to Krasnov, some medical people examined Sergi and had the railroad car redirected to Ulyanovsk rather than to the original destination of Orenburg, which was 600 kilometers still farther to the east. Somewhat later, a violent quarrel broke out between two of the sons of a Renovationist hierarch, and all the sick old metropolitan could do was to press himself still deeper into a corner of the compartment. ⁷²

Finally the train reached Ulyanovsk, which Krasnov described as "for two years the Russian Vatican, the religious capital" of the country. It was a quiet, sleepy town, "with almost no factories, no tram lines, and automobiles one could count on one's fingers." ⁷³

According to Alexeev, "Sergi was met . . . only by the chairman of the local Orthodox parish society. . . . Not even a group of believers met him. . . . There was no place for him to live . . . and he stayed for a few days in a railroad car. . . . Sergi sent . . . to a neighboring town to get church keys, organize a church society of twenty persons and start services. . . . When Sergi arrived, church activity had been virtually suspended." ⁷⁴

Krasnov's description was similar: "There was one little cemetery church, hardly more than a chapel, at which a young monastic priest of doubtful reputation and uncertain ecclesiastical loyalty was serving. It became the first 'pitiful outpost' of the Moscow Patriarchate in the region. Sergi did not even have a place to stay." Kolchitski and others "began feverish efforts to find a suitable church." Krasnov continued: standing . . . but long in disuse. They had deteriorated to the point of being beyond any quick restoration to tolerable condition, particularly in wartime circumstances. . . . Finally [Kolchitski and the others] took over the former Roman Catholic parish church with an auxiliary premises where the parish priest had once lived. Soon the little church was opened under the imposing name of the Kazan Cathedral, and [Sergi] . . . moved into the former apartment of the priest. ⁷⁵

It is said that Sergi had very little disposable income. The story is told that on one occasion Sergi wanted to give money to someone in need but could find none, so he gave his watch instead. ⁷⁶

The light of the "candle in the wind" of the Russian Orthodox Church still shone forth to Soviet people and to the world, but for all too many Soviet citizens who were far from any church or priest it must have flickered in the distance, beckoning elusively from afar, with the ever-present danger that the flame might be extinguished by a single order from that former seminarian, Joseph Stalin.

Whatever Harm the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union did to Europe and the world, it rescued the institution of the Russian Orthodox Church. Hitler's deal with Stalin allowed the Soviets to occupy eastern Poland, and 1,200 Orthodox parishes were incorporated into the Soviet Union as a result. ¹ Then, in mid-June of 1940, the Soviets occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, among whose 6 million people were almost a half million traditionally Orthodox persons who worshiped in about 300 Orthodox churches. ² Later in the same month the Soviets compelled the Romanians to cede Bessarabia and northern Bukovina with their 4 million people, 3 million of them traditionally Orthodox. There were between 2,000 and 2,500 parishes in these formerly Romanian lands. These annexations brought the Russian Orthodox Church more than 6 million traditionally Orthodox people and 3,500-4,000 churches with active priests, as well as many monasteries and nunneries, some bishops and seminaries, and other resources. The institutional strength of the church must have increased fifteen fold.

The communists soon started closing churches and arresting priests and lay Christians in the newly acquired lands, but they also understood that the Russian Orthodox Church could be an instrument of assimilation and of Soviet control. ³ It was no accident that two of the only four surviving active Russian Orthodox bishops were sent to the annexed territories. Metropolitan Sergi (Voskresenski) was sent to Riga, and Nikolai (Yarushevich), Aleksi's former suffragan in Leningrad, was sent as exarch for western Ukraine and Byelorussia. ⁴ The communists soon began the process of Russifying defiant separatist religious communities and suppressing Ukrainian, Byelorussian, and Baltic nationalists allied with non-Soviet church hierarchs. In this sense the interests of the beleaguered church and the Soviet authorities had elements in common. The result was that the draconian Soviet attack on all religious manifestations, which was still going on in the "old" Soviet territories, was only partially extended to these newly acquired western lands, and religious institutions in those areas largely survived.

In August of 1941 the Soviet embassy in London released exact figures on the number of functioning churches in the Soviet Union on the eve of Hitler's June attack. Apparently the Soviets did this to counter criticism of Soviet religious suppression voiced by their newly acquired British allies, but the press release backfired because Westerners were impressed with the paucity of the numbers rather than their magnitude. Little did they know how low pre-September 1939 figures would have been.

The figures for the Orthodox and Renovationists (mostly the Living Church) were 4,225 churches and 37 convents (monasteries and nunneries). ⁵ The separatist Renovationists had already been much reduced by 1941, and almost all those remaining rejoined the patriarchal church over the next several years. Therefore, the 4,225 churches could effectively be regarded as Orthodox, and over 90 percent of them were in the lands annexed in 1939-1940. ⁶

When Hitler launched his invasion, German forces advanced with great speed along a thousand-mile front stretching from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. As already described, Orthodox priests came in their wake and opened churches, to the joy and gratitude of believers. Initially the German soldiers were welcomed by many in the populace with the traditional bread and salt of hospitality, and Stalin apparently began to fear that Orthodox Christianity might become a weapon of the invaders against a reeling, staggering Soviet defense. Metropolitan Sergi had been quick to rally believers to the defense of the motherland, however, and the Nazi Germans' arrogance and brutality soon began to alienate the peoples in the Wehrmacht's path. ⁷

Long-occupied lands experienced a much greater religious revival during World War II than those briefly occupied or close to the front lines. For example, the advancing Germans found one church in each of the cities of Kiev and Kharkov. In Kiev, occupied three years and generally far behind the lines, believers opened twenty-five churches during the course of the occupation. In Kharkov, always close to the battle lines and much fought over, believers opened only two churches. ⁸

Life for the surviving Orthodox people in areas under continuing Soviet rule remained extremely hard, particularly in the blockaded city of Leningrad. During the siege, the priest and deacon at the Transfiguration Church lived in the church's cellar. At the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, an eyewitness reported: Metropolitan Aleksi courageously walked in procession with an icon around the church even during air raids. . . . In the meantime the members of the Cathedral choir were dying, one-by-one, until the choirmaster himself collapsed and died in the middle of a church service. . . . The three surviving women in the choir grew so weak that they could no longer climb to the choir loft, but they continued to sing as best they could from a low platform in the sanctuary (the kliros). . . . Aleksi himself was wasting away, looking increasingly waxy. A novice monk named Yevlagi foraged just enough food to keep the Metropolitan alive. . . . Another witness, Nikolai Uspenski, reported passing by the Cathedral one day. He saw an older man struggling to clear enough snow to make a walkway to the church. It was Aleksi. Nikolai joined in to help, and Aleksi invited him to reestablish the choir, which by then had expired. . . . The last remaining deacon in Leningrad continued to serve until he, too, died. Thereafter Aleksi celebrated the liturgy alone. ⁹

Soviet government policy toward the Russian Orthodox Church was changing, albeit slowly. Antireligious propaganda stopped, and the League of the Militant Godless was dissolved in September of 1941. A small number of churches were reopened in late 1941 around Ulyanovsk where Metropolitan Sergi had set up church headquarters after his evacuation from Moscow. Soon bishops were consecrated and a few churches opened in Saratov, Orenburg, Kuibyshev, and other places east of Moscow. ¹⁰ This was not a large-scale development; Alexeev estimated that no more than a few dozen churches were able to open their doors. ¹¹ In the spring of 1942 the church leadership consisted of three metropolitans — Sergi (Stragorodski), Aleksi (Simanski) and Nikolai (Yarushevich) — and eight active diocesan bishops. ¹² In January of 1943 Sergi obtained Stalin's written permission to open a bank account to handle the church's collections in support of the Red Army. The church's fortunes continued to improve, and in March of 1943 Bishop Luka (Voino-Yasenetski) happily wrote his son that a church had been opened in the distant Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, where the bishop, who was still technically a religious detainee, was serving as chief surgeon at a military hospital. ¹³

On September 4, 1943, Stalin received Metropolitans Sergi, Aleksi, and Nikolai in the Kremlin. A Soviet writer with access to the record of the meeting reported that Stalin met earlier in the day with Georgi Malenkov, Lavrenti Beria, and Georgi G. Karpov, an NKVD general who would later become head of the Soviet government's Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs. ¹⁴ Stalin wanted to ensure that the church would not stray from government control, and he had asked whether he should receive the three church hierarchs. His aides endorsed the idea, and the churchmen responded to the summons that same day. Stalin was accompanied at the meeting by Vyacheslav Molotov and Karpov.

Stalin assented to Sergi's request for a church council to elect a patriarch. When the clerics proposed a date weeks later, Stalin asked, "Why so slow?" Stalin ultimately offered some transportation and financial support to solve the church's severe logistical problems. ¹⁵ Four days after the meeting, a national church council of nineteen bishops elected Sergi as patriarch. ¹⁶ At the meeting with Stalin, Aleksi and Sergi also requested permission to organize theological courses for priests, the aim being later establishment of seminaries and academies. Stalin said: "Go straight to seminaries and academies — but it's your business!" The churchmen asked for permission to set up shops and candle factories, to publish a monthly journal, to open new churches, to consecrate bishops, and to ordain more priests. Stalin assented. The churchmen sought authorization for a part of parish and diocesan receipts to be given to the central church administration and for the inclusion of priests in parish executive organs. Stalin did not object. The hierarchs then turned to less "convenient" questions, including the fate of imprisoned hierarchs and clergy and the seizure of the living quarters of arrested priests. Stalin told the churchmen to make lists of cases and said Karpov would look into these matters. Finally Malenkov suggested that a photographer be brought in to take a photograph. Stalin responded that it was already two o'clock in the morning and "we'll do it another time." During the remaining ten years of Stalin's life, there never was another time. ¹⁷

Why did Stalin receive the hierarchs, and why did he do so when he did, more than two years after Hitler's invasion? The probable explanation starts with his limited amelioration of church policy in 1941, which was in reaction to the renaissance of church life behind German lines and his evident fear that the yearnings of Soviet believers would make them anti-Soviet activists. In the desperate months of the initial Soviet retreat and in the renewed retreats of 1942, Stalin's energies were concentrated on survival and military strategy; he probably concluded — to the extent that he thought about Sergi and his church — that additional concessions would have little effect on Sergi's already supportive public stand. By 1943, however, Stalin was thinking more about politics, and Red forces were liberating areas where newly opened Orthodox churches abounded. Soviet social control in these formerly occupied areas was partial at best, and Stalin may have felt that an indiscriminate closure of Orthodox churches would be difficult to enforce. Some sort of policy was clearly necessary, and Sergi's church was an instrument of Soviet dominance over unsubmissive Ukrainian and Byelorussian Greek-Catholics, sects, and other religious forces that had collaborated in varying degrees with the Germans. A softer policy toward the Russian Orthodox Church could reduce the incentive to organize a religious underground, which Stalin clearly did not want, and diminish unrest. Moreover, Stalin's own atheism was probably as much political and pragmatic as profoundly held. ¹⁸

In addition, as William Fletcher suggested, Stalin may have been willing to elevate Sergi to the patriarchal office in order to strengthen Sergi's hand in his struggle with the separatist Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Metropolitan Polykarp (Sikorski). The last thing Stalin wanted was a vigorous, independent Ukrainian church that was ready to help political nationalists longing for a non-Soviet Ukraine. The same national church council in Moscow that elevated Sergi also excommunicated Polykarp. ¹⁹

Foreign policy may also have entered into Stalin's calculations. Stalin was hoping for loans and other help from the West, and he undoubtedly was aware of Western sensitivities regarding the persecution of religion in the USSR. Stalin wanted the West to open a second front in France, and his natural political allies in England included the dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, and the archbishop of York, who was planning to lead a church delegation to Moscow. The Tehran summit meeting of Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill was in the offing. Moreover, the Russian Orthodox Church might prove useful in furthering Soviet ambitions in the Balkans and the near east after the war. Reportedly Stalin had quizzed Malenkov, Beria, and Karpov about the patriarchates of Constantinople and Jerusalem and the Orthodox churches of Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia when he held his preparatory meeting on September 4,1943. In fact, Russian Orthodox hierarchs were subsequently employed in the pursuit of Stalin's goals in those areas. ²⁰

According to Russian Orthodox Church sources, after Patriarch Sergi was enthroned in September 1943, "the number of churches began to increase in both the cities and villages." ²¹ The fact that church sources were explicit in saying that the number "began" to increase in late 1943 would tend to confirm that Metropolitan Sergi had been able to open only a very few churches during his two previous years of residency in Ulyanovsk. Even after the meeting, the Soviet government hardly rushed to authorize new parishes. According to one well-placed source, Vyacheslav Molotov instructed Karpov to delay authorizing the registration of new church societies until the situation could be surveyed, recommendations submitted, and clearance obtained. Molotov was quoted as saying: "We will have to open churches in some places, but the policy is to keep the process slow." ²²

Sergi lived for eight months after his historic meeting with Stalin. During that time regular dioceses were established in Soviet territories behind the war zones, and more bishops were consecrated. An official Soviet report dated March 15, 1944, listed twenty-nine functioning bishops besides the patriarch. ²³ The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate resumed publication. ²⁴

Metropolitan Sergi died on May 15, 1944, and Metropolitan Aleksi of Leningrad became acting head of the church. The opening of churches continued, as did the consecration of new bishops and the ordination of pious laymen as priests. Priests in hiding or detention increasingly were able to return to their clerical duties. Many priests who had opened churches under the German occupation continued to serve.

A pastoral school and theological institute opened in Moscow in June 1944, a development that reversed the total prohibition of such institutions that had been in effect since the beginning of the 1930s. In August of 1944 Karpov stated that the number of Orthodox churches exceeded the prewar figure. By that time Soviet troops had already pushed the Germans out of pre-1939 Soviet territories and were fast reconquering the lands annexed in 1939 and 1940. Most of the functioning parishes were in these formerly occupied lands. In late November of 1944 Aleksi reported to a council of bishops that "over two hundred churches" had been opened in the USSR in the year after Sergi had been enthroned; no doubt he was referring to churches in the Soviet heartland. Two Soviet government decrees, one at the end of 1944 and another in mid-1945, authorized the turning over of 300 more churches to the Orthodox. ²⁵

On January 31,1945, a national church council convened in Moscow and unanimously elected Aleksi as the new patriarch. Of the forty-two bishops then in the country, forty-one were in attendance; Archbishop Luka (Voino-Yasenetski), then of Tambov, was not invited as a consequence of his objection to the uncanonical presentation of a single candidate for patriarch. ²⁶

A Soviet government decree of August 22, 1945, implemented Stalin's 1943 decision to grant the church significant attributes of a "legal person." The church could thereafter lease, construct, and purchase houses (but not the land under them), own and operate vehicles, and establish shops for the manufacture of candles and religious objects. Local authorities were instructed to provide the church with necessary materials for building and repair, and the ban on ringing church bells was eased. ²⁷ By April of 1946 the church's hierarchy consisted of a patriarch, four metropolitans, twenty-one archbishops, and thirty-six bishops, a total of sixty-two. ²⁸

By that April, two and a half years after Stalin received Sergi, the continuity of the patriarchate had been reaffirmed and a patriarchal residence and central administration in Moscow had been reestablished. ²⁹ A church governing a handful of dioceses in the central USSR had grown to more than fifty sees spread throughout the country; a few dozen churches had become a few thousand; the supply of priests had increased greatly; the Renovationist schism had disappeared; seminaries and theological academies had reopened; and convents in annexed territories and some reconstituted under German occupation had been able to renew the cloistered life of monks and nuns in the USSR. In some ways the church remained beleaguered, but the contrast between its situation in 1939 and its condition in 1946 was immense.

The recovery and expansion of the church's institutional strength continued until 1948, a year that marked a high point for the immediate postwar period. There were six components of the church's institutional strength in 1948. The first of them consisted of the 200-300 churches and the beleaguered company of priests and hierarchs that had survived the persecutions of the first decades of communist rule. The second source of renewed strength was the government-permitted opportunity to open churches in territories never occupied by the Germans. An inspector of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs reported that 1,270 churches were opened in these lands between 1944 and 1947, most of them in the Russian Federated Republic. ³⁰ Thus 1,600-1,700 churches must have been functioning in these areas in 1947. ³¹ Most of the clergy who staffed these churches were priests obliged to take secular employment in the 1930s, clerics forced into hiding or taken to labor camps, and pious laymen with experience as psalmists or readers who could be ordained as deacons and priests.

The third component in Orthodox institutional strength consisted of the resources acquired in the 1939-1940 annexations. The Soviets lost these lands, churches, priests, and people in the weeks that followed the German invasion in 1941, but they reacquired the territories, most of the churches (those not destroyed), some of the priests, and most of the people before the end of 1944. Of the 3,500-4,000 parishes acquired in the 1939-1940 annexations, 3,000-3,200 seem to have survived into the postwar period as functioning churches. Over half of the convents that emerged from the war were located in the annexed lands. In fact, almost a quarter of the convents in the USSR after the war were located in the single diocese of Kishinev (Moldavia).

The fourth major source of renewed strength came from the prewar Soviet territories occupied by the Germans, where churches were reopened in large numbers. In the diocese of Kiev alone, between 700 and 800 parishes had opened in the 1941-1943 period. ³² An inspector for the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs gave the figure of 7,547 churches opened in the occupied territories between 1941 and 1945. ³³ Not all of these newly opened churches stayed open, but most did. Perhaps as many as 6,000-6,200 of them survived the immediate postwar upheavals.

The fifth source of augmented strength for the Russian Orthodox Church was in territories first annexed after World War II. ³⁴ Transcarpathia, with a population approaching 1.5 million, was ceded by Czechoslovakia to the USSR on June 29, 1945. The Greek-Catholics in Transcarpathia were obliged to submit to patriarchal authority in a process that lasted several years and was characterized by widespread violence, including the assassination of the ruling Greek-Catholic bishop. ³⁵ The Russian Orthodox Church thereby became the only large overt religious community in that territory; there were 559 Orthodox churches, 407 of them former Greek-Catholic parishes. Transcarpathia emerged from the World War II period with two monasteries, four nunneries, and twelve small hermitages. ³⁶

The forced incorporation of the Greek-Catholics in Galicia was the sixth important augmentation of the church's institutional resources in the postwar period. Under conditions of great intimidation and after the arrest of the Greek Catholic hierarchy in western Ukraine, a Russian Orthodox Church council assembled in Lvov in March of 1946. In a memorandum to Stalin dated March 15, 1945, Karpov had complained about Orthodox passivity in the "fight with Catholicism," and Stalin no doubt made the decision personally to convene the council. Soviet government and NKVD agents organized the meeting. ³⁷ The result was the forced conversion of almost 2,500 Greek-Catholic parishes to Russian Orthodoxy. ³⁸ Virtually all of these were incorporated into what are now the dioceses of Lvov, Ternopol, and Ivano-Frankovsk. In addition, the few remaining Greek-Catholic parishes in Byelorussia were absorbed into the Russian Orthodox establishment. ³⁹ Orthodox spokesmen subsequently gave the figure of "about 3,000" Greek-Catholic parishes as the number joining Orthodoxy in Byelorussia and western Ukraine, including Transcarpathia. ⁴⁰

The total for these six components of Russian Orthodox Church strength is a median figure of slightly more than 14,000 churches in January of 1947. This correlates closely with figures declassified in the late 1980s from the official archives of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs. The council recorded 14,039 registered church societies or parishes on January 1, 1947. Its figure in early 1946 was 10,504 registered church societies. ⁴¹ The difference reflects the almost 3,000 Greek-Catholic parishes added to the Orthodox rolls in 1946 and the continuing, although slackening, registration of new church societies throughout the country.

For January 1, 1945, the council recorded 14,100 church societies, or roughly 3,500 more than in January of 1946. There are several reasons for the apparent decline in 1945. First, the January 1945 figure was rounded, whereas other council figures over the years were invariably expressed in exact numbers. The council's commissioner for Ukraine submitted a report during this period in which he stated candidly that his records were unreliable and incomplete. The central authorities in Moscow were also estimating the number of rural churches and priests in the country in the 1945 period. ⁴² The 1945 figure can therefore be considered a rough estimate that was corrected in the course of 1945.

Moreover, some churches opened during the German occupation were denied registration and had to close after the war. Many hundreds of priests had fled with the retreating Axis troops, leaving parishes vacant. Both Soviet regulations and Orthodox canons denied standing to a church without a priest, and the authorities deregistered quite a number of parishes on this basis. The Soviet government also decreed that arrangements made under the German occupation were invalid. Churches opened under the Germans fell under this proscription, which was enforced in some cases. As already mentioned, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church of Archbishop Polykarp, which had opened about 500 churches in Ukraine, came under heavy Soviet government and Russian Orthodox attack as a "Fascist" body; some of its churches were closed (and others were turned over to the Orthodox). ⁴³ Further, a council inspector noted that less than half of the churches in Poltava Oblast under the German occupation in 1941 and 1942 were registered by the council after the war because the other communities of believers failed to get the "necessary documents." ⁴⁴ The council's records contain frequent notations that churches were closed because there was "no priest," because the church was "not active," or because the church society was unable to collect the required "documents" of eligibility to remain open.

New registrations continued on a reduced scale under more restrictive ground rules through 1947 and into 1948. The number of officially registered parishes in January 1948 was 14,329, an increase of about 300 registered parishes over the previous year. ⁴⁵ The 1949 figure of 14,421 parishes documented an additional increase of slightly fewer than 100, these concentrated almost entirely in Ukraine and Byelorussia. Most communities of believers had to submit repeated petitions before getting registration. ⁴⁶ An indication of the degree to which authorizations were cautiously handled and reluctantly approved was a report by a council inspector in early 1948 who noted that the believers in a town he was visiting had submitted fifteen petitions to register their parish in the period since the war. ⁴⁷

As for the priests, the Russian Orthodox Church emerged from the war with an acute shortage of clerics in the western lands, which is where most of the churches were. The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate reported that for two years after the Soviet expulsion of the Germans from Moldavia in August 1944, the bishop of Kishinev dedicated his full efforts to filling parishes left vacant by priests who had fled or to finding worthy priests for parishes led by canonically unqualified persons. In those two years, approximately half the parishes were successfully supplied with qualified priests. ⁴⁸ The same reality was identified by the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs, which in April 1946 recorded 269 registered priests for the 582 churches in Moldavia. ⁴⁹ The Baltic states had a similar problem, even if on a smaller scale. Had there been enough priests available in the western lands between 1944 and 1947, 1,000-2,000 parishes that were denied registration after the war might have remained open.

The image that emerges from the foregoing description is a Russian Orthodox Church rescued from its institutional agony by the infusion of resources after the Soviet Union's territorial annexations and by the religiously permissive policies of the German occupation forces, which in turn caused the Soviet government to become more permissive. Forces set in motion between 1939 and 1943 caused a great strengthening of the church. Nevertheless, the material institution of the church still fell far short of the resources and strength it had commanded before the Bolshevik revolution or even during the 1920s and early 1930s. ⁵⁰

The imbalances in terms of nationality and geography made the anomaly of the church's situation striking. The Russian Orthodox Church had become a predominantly Ukrainian institution, as almost two-thirds of its parishes were in Ukraine. If the parishes in Byelorussia, the Baltic states, and former Romanian Bessarabia are included, more than 80 percent of church parishes were in western lands annexed in 1939 and 1940 or occupied by the Germans during World War II. As one of the council's inspectors noted, in January of 1948 Ukraine had 78 percent of the churches located there in 1914; the Russian republic had 5 percent. ⁵¹ The geographic imbalance was similar in terms of monks, monasteries, nuns, and nunneries. Moreover, 20 percent of the Russian Orthodox parishes in the USSR had been seized from the Ukrainian Greek-Catholics. There were more formerly Greek-Catholic churches in the Russian Orthodox Church institution than there were Russian Orthodox churches over the length and breadth of the immense Russian Federated Republic. About half of the churches in the country were in territories that had not been part of the Soviet Union in early 1939. This increased the usefulness of the church to the Soviet government as an instrument of Russification, but it also increased the church's vulnerability. Inevitably it would find itself in the cross fire as tensions over nationality grew. One can understand why Orthodox hierarchs have been so sensitive when Ukrainian GreekCatholics and Catholics throughout the world have pressed the issue of religious liberty and the right of Ukrainian Greek-Catholics to the same opportunity to worship that the Soviet constitution extended to other religious communities.

In 1948 Stalin's apparent benevolence turned once again to official hostility. What Bohdan Bociurkiw described as a "golden era" of Russian Orthodox Church expansion came to an end. ⁵²

In the pages that follow, an examination of the number of functioning Orthodox churches in the USSR in the late 1940s and 1950s forms a considerable part of the material I present. Why have I emphasized what are, in the last analysis, bricks, stones, mortar, wood, and nails? The answer is that the performance of the liturgy in a physically extant church is crucially important in Orthodoxy. The rite is the Russian Orthodox Church's glory. A thousand years ago, as the earliest Russian Chronicle tells it, Prince Vladimir sent emissaries to observe the Muslim Bulgars, the Catholic Germans, and the Orthodox Greeks. His delegates returned with unflattering comments about the Bulgars and the Catholics, but when they worshipped with the Orthodox Greeks, "we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor nor such beauty." ¹

Contemporary Orthodox people have the same view. Metropolitan Vladimir (Sabodan) described a Christian's experience in church: "For us believers our presence in church is truly an encounter with God, a meeting with the saints, represented visibly in the form of icons. . . . The very architecture of the church, the brightly burning candles, and the painting on the walls in clear and clean tones, call forth . . . joy and hope, and . . . radiant reflections." ²

Fathers Nikolai Eshliman and Gleb Yakunin described the Orthodox church building as "indeed the house of God, the focal point of church life, the spiritual table which feeds the faithful with the incorruptible gifts of divine grace." ³ Anatoli Levitin-Krasnov said: "Every church is the most precious thing in the whole world, it is washed with the believers' tears." ⁴

The transcending importance of the physical church and of the liturgy celebrated there constitutes both a strength and a vulnerability. When the churches are closed, the loss is all the greater. Soviet sociologists reported that Orthodox believers who migrated to towns that had no church found their commitment weakening and ultimately dissipating. ⁵ No doubt the observers were biased, but it is nevertheless critical for the Orthodox believer to be able to get to a church, at least occasionally.

With characteristic eloquence, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn described Russia's closed churches: They nod to each other from afar. . . . They soar to the same heaven. . . . You are never alone: the head of some bell tower will beckon to you. . . . But when you get into the village you find that not the living but the dead greeted you from afar. The crosses were knocked off the roof or twisted out of place long ago. . . . Weeds grow . . . in the cracks in the walls. . . . On the porch there are barrels of lubricating oil. . . . Or else a truck has smashed into the church doorway to pick up some sacks. . . . People were always selfish and often unkind. But the evening bells used to ring out, floating over villages, fields and woods. Reminding men that they must . . . give their time and thought to eternity. These bells . . . raised people up and prevented them from dropping down on all fours. Our forefathers gave their best; all their understanding of life they put into these stones, into these bell towers. Ram it in, Vitka, give it a bash, don't be afraid! Film show at six, dancing at eight. ⁶

The film Repentance closes with an old woman asking the film's heroine if the road they are on leads to the church. On being told that it does not, the old woman answers as she trudges off: "Oh, what good is a road if it doesn't lead to the church?" ⁷

Between 1948 and 1953, during Stalin's last five years of life, the aging dictator's policies shifted back toward repression. By January of 1954 the Russian Orthodox Church had lost about 1,000 of the slightly more than 14,400 registered parishes it had in January of 1949. Data from the archive of the Soviet government's Council for Religious Affairs are as follows for the years between January of 1947 and January of 1954, which was a little less than ten months after Stalin's death: ⁸

The Soviet government cut back sharply on new church registrations in 1948 and — except for Transcarpathia — had altogether stopped registering new churches and parishes by 1949. ⁹ The Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate lacked any report of a new parish church consecration between January of 1949 and mid-December of 1952. ¹⁰ Also in 1948, the authorities started deregistering previously accepted parishes at an increasing rate. From 1944 to 1948, deregistration of church buildings recorded in the council's archive had never exceeded 20 in a single year. In 1948 deregistrations jumped to 73; they rose to 400 in 1950 and only began to ease off in 1953, the year Stalin died. The country lost about 7 percent of its parishes. ¹¹ In 1948 the council began to record the number of churches being demolished to make the materials available for other construction. The council also began to record the conversion of church buildings to factories, workers' clubs, shops, and movie houses. Ukraine, which had about two-thirds of the churches in the whole country in 1948, accounted for approximately two-thirds of the deregistrations.

Serious problems continued in western Ukraine. In 1945 Ukrainian nationalist forces under the leadership of Stepan Bandera, a Greek-Catholic priest, had retreated to the wooded hills and battled the Red Army and Soviet security forces in a guerrilla war that lasted for several years. On September 20, 1948, supporters of the nationalist and Greek-Catholic cause assassinated Archpriest Gavriil Kostelnik, a principal organizer of the 1946 Lvov council that had forced the GreekCatholics to join Orthodoxy. ¹² Declaring the merger of the Greek-Catholic and Orthodox churches had been easier than accomplishing it, and many formerly Greek-Catholic churches ended up closed and locked. There were also numerous reports of Greek-Catholic believers and priests going secretly to these churches to use them for religious services. ¹³

The factors that might have caused disproportionately high church closings in Ukraine as a whole were counterbalanced by relative leniency toward the Orthodox in formerly Greek-Catholic areas. More than a third of the churches in Ukraine were located in these territories, but only about a quarter of the Ukrainian deregistrations occurred there. The authorities continued to carry a large number of locked and shuttered churches on the books as registered Orthodox religious communities even though they had no priest and were inactive.

In the years after the Lvov council, the Orthodox leadership was notably permissive about what it regarded as continuing "Roman" or Latin deviations in the practices of formerly Greek-Catholic clerics. In 1950, however, Archbishop Makari (Oksiyuk) of Lvov started an "Orthodoxisation" drive, issuing a pastoral letter designed to eliminate aberrations. ¹⁴ The ensuing controversy and struggle resulted in the resignation or dismissal of additional priests and the closure of some churches. The number of registered churches in Ukraine dropped by almost 300 in 1950, more than in any other year between 1949 and 1954. ¹⁵

There were greater relative losses in central and eastern Ukraine than in the formerly Greek-Catholic territories. Most central and eastern oblasts lost 10-15 percent of their Orthodox parishes (compared to 7 percent in the whole country). Poltava oblast declined from 326 functioning churches in early 1944 to 262 after Stalin's death, a loss of about 20 percent. ¹⁶ In comparison, functioning churches in the Russian republic dropped from 3,228 in January of 1948 to 2,980 in January of 1954, a loss of 8 percent. ¹⁷

Not a single new bishop was elevated to that office in the USSR between April of 1950 and the end of 1952. Sixteen of the eighty-five monasteries and nunneries functioning in 1948 were closed down. The blessing of the waters at Epiphany, which had been permitted for a few years after the end of the war, was forbidden in 1949. ¹⁸ Publicly announced new church periodicals in Estonia and Moldavia failed to materialize. ¹⁹

Why did Stalin move again toward repression during the last five years of his life? In the first place, Hitler was defeated, the war was over, and the need for Orthodox Church support was no longer what it had been. Besides, the regime had reestablished the essentials of its pervasive prewar social control and was reasserting its hold on the life of the people. ²⁰ During these years there was a broad reversion to earlier policies, and Stalin did not exempt the church. Many Soviets had thought that the postwar period would bring a happier time when a grateful leader would strive to reward his long-suffering people for the sacrifices endured. Such false hopes disappeared as Stalin sank deeper into a mood of suspicion and bitterness. Those years of cultural suppression became known as the Zhdanovshchina (after Andrei A. Zhdanov, who was point man in the campaign against intellectuals, artists, and writers). In foreign policy, they spanned the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin crisis, the Western airlift, and the Korean War. No sensitivity to Western opinion could have acted as a great element of restraint during those times. In 1952 the fabricated Jewish doctors' plot (in which nine physicians, most of them Jewish, at the Kremlin were accused of killing Zhdanov and other Soviet leaders) and Stalin's apparent decision to launch another great purge made a liberal religious policy even less likely.

Interestingly, the crackdown against the Orthodox Church apparently did not last in full force until the day of Stalin's death. A bishop was consecrated on March 1, 1953, four days before Stalin died, and the meeting of the Holy Synod that named this bishop reportedly was held in January of 1953. What appears to have been a new Orthodox prayer house was also consecrated on December 12, 1952; work on its foundation supposedly started the previous June. ²¹ One prayer house does not make a spring thaw, of course, and these small indications do not reveal whether the old man's hands were loosening. Another possible explanation might be connected to the work of the Orthodox Church in organizing a countrywide conference of Soviet religious leaders in May of 1952 at the Trinity-Sergius monastery in Zagorsk, at which time an intensified defense-of-peace campaign was launched. Some of the tiny church groups heard from there may have been given the chance to organize their leadership from scratch as part of the conference preparations. Perhaps the Orthodox had also been thrown a concession or two.

The fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church brightened considerably in the period after Stalin died. Nikita Struve described it as a time of "relative freedom" that peaked in 1957 and ended in 1958. ²² In those years the Orthodox were able to publish a half dozen liturgical books, including a prayer book and a Bible. ²³ The church was allowed to consecrate eight bishops in 1953, and the number of bishops increased over the next few years and reached a high of seventy-three in 1957. ²⁴

Antireligious propaganda actually intensified for a time after Stalin's death; the peak came in the summer of 1954. ²⁵ In November, however, a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, signed by Nikita S. Khrushchev as first secretary, resulted in the toning down of the propaganda campaign. Its key passage was as follows: "Administrative measures of any kind and insulting attacks . . . can only do harm, can only lead to strengthening and even intensifying the religious convictions" of believers. ²⁶ This was not the first time such a caveat had been uttered: After the 1922 campaign the Communist Party had stated that "it is necessary to liquidate all attempts to uproot religion by administrative measures, such as the closing of churches." ²⁷ After the 1929 wave, a decree was issued stating that "the closing of churches was effected by local authorities against the will of the people" and ordering the cessation of such practices. ²⁸ Likewise, in 1939 the use of coercion in 1937 and 1938 was deplored, and party organs were advised to avoid offending the sensibilities of believers. ²⁹ As we shall see, 1954 would not be the last such word, just as it was not the first. ³⁰

The Twentieth Communist Party Congress of February 1956 and Khrushchev's Secret Speech recounting Stalin's crimes produced a faltering of dedication to Stalin's memory and to Stalinism that opened the door to a renewal of faith and a renaissance in religious commitment. Commissioners of the Council for Russian Orthodox Church Affairs began noting in their secret reports that more worshipers were going to church.